Spam in July: Hot Weather Nurtures Financial Phishing

LONDON, September 2, 2014 /PRNewswire/ --

Although it's the height of summer and most businesses are in a natural lull, Kaspersky Lab's experts reported a substantial increase in the amount of financial phishing in spam. There was a 7.9 percentage points increase in the amount of scam emails exploiting the names of reputable banks, payment services, online stores and similar organisations; as a result, such messages represented nearly 42 per cent of all phishing messages. Among all payment systems, cybercriminals paid the most attention to PayPal: references to this service triggered the most dramatic increase in alerts from our anti-phishing component.

Organizations most frequently targeted by phishers, by category - July 2014 

Overall the share of spam in the email traffic increased by 2.2 percentage points in July, bringing it to 67 per cent. The USA is again the "leading" country of origin for unsolicited email: one sixth (15.3 per cent) of all global spam was sent from this country. Russia keeps its long-standing second position in this ranking with 5.6 per cent of all spam; this, however, is 1.4 percentage points less than in June. China remains in third place, supplying 5.3 per cent of global spam.

If we look at the topics of spam, the long hot summer has certainly left its mark. In particular, the Russian segment of the Internet saw a surge of spam messages advertising sun protection and items to battle the heat. In July, Kaspersky Lab's experts also recorded an increase in the number of spam emails offering a variety of summer goods, such as: air conditioners, cooling fans, sunscreen films for windows, bottled water and sunglasses.

Summer also means holidays, and since everyone wants to look their best on the beach, spammers were on hand to offer some help. There were a number of spam emails in July advertising all types of skin care cosmetics and seasonal discounts from beauty shops and parlours. Kaspersky Lab's experts also discovered video tutorials advertised as "beauty secrets" revealed by a renowned stylist.

Spammers did not overlook corporate users either, although business activity is far from its peak in July. In the middle of the summer, cybercriminals specialising in distributing advertising emails in the Russian part of the Internet decided to grab users' attention with offers related to organising corporate events outdoors and aquatic entertainment.

"In summer, business activity slows down and spammers switch to more lucrative partner spam - including some malicious mailings. As a result, spam becomes more criminalised and poses a greater risk to users. Therefore in July we noticed that spammers were taking a greater interest in financial services. In addition, the top position in our ranking of malicious spam attachments was, for the first time in a long while, taken by a Trojan downloader used to steal users' sensitive data," commented senior Kaspersky Lab spam analyst Tatyana Shcherbakova.

The full report on spam trends in July is available on Kaspersky Lab's official analysis resource at Securelist.com.

About Kaspersky Lab 

Kaspersky Lab is the world's largest privately held vendor of endpoint protection solutions. The company is ranked among the world's top four vendors of security solutions for endpoint users*. Throughout its more than 17-year history Kaspersky Lab has remained an innovator in IT security and provides effective digital security solutions for large enterprises, SMBs and consumers. Kaspersky Lab, with its holding company registered in the United Kingdom, currently operates in almost 200 countries and territories across the globe, providing protection for over 300 million users worldwide. Learn more at http://www.kaspersky.com.

* The company was rated fourth in the IDC rating Worldwide Endpoint Security Revenue by Vendor, 2012. The rating was published in the IDC report "Worldwide Endpoint Security 2013-2017 Forecast and 2012 Vendor Shares (IDC #242618, August 2013). The report ranked software vendors according to earnings from sales of endpoint security solutions in 2012. 

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Kaspersky Lab UK
Ruth Knowles
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